The dark side of the laboratories!

Hello… World?

It all began many years ago, when I was a child. My dad often likes to fix all the broken (and therefore fixable) stuffs, and when he was younger he usually bought some kits from “Else Electronics” where you build “DIY” little circuits capable to do different things. Even now he has a box full of those circuits! I always loved my father, I’m really proud of him, and loved how he was capable to fix, built or invent all these electronic things, so I inherited this passion. Some years later my dad came at home with a BIG box: A COMPUTER! One day, at his workplace, they changed all the computers, and many of them were dismissed, and maybe trown in the dump… It was an 8086 from IBM, with a 5 inches floppy reader, 30MB HDD (WOW!) and a super brilliant green-phosphor screen! And yes, with MS DOS 2.x on-board, I guess, no games, only Wordstar and some other office programs, but it was still awesome. Two or three years after my uncle gave us our first 486: COLORS! So we started with DOS 3.x, Windows 3.11 and tons of floppy disks with… GAMES!!! And when my dad bought a newer computer (AMD Duron 600MHz), well… Wolfenstain 3D, Doom, Duke Nukem 3D… What else should I say? :P

But that’s not all, I also love videogame consoles, even though I was not very “lucky” this time. I began with a Nintendo NES clone, bought for a bunch of bucks, after many and many years my first 32bit console, the PlayStation. Only a few years ago I started to collect videogames and console, of course the main problem is being an expensive hobby…

However in the following years, beyound games, I learned many things on computers. I discovered what an HexEditor is, how Windows OS works, and when we had our first 56k modem… Does anybody know paradogs.com? Well, learned so much on PSX architecture, a bit of hacking/cracking and… PROTRACKERS! Tons of protrackers downloaded from web! Ahhh… I still love it! And you can’t imagine how many times during the year my dad had to format the computer because of my… experiments, ehm…

While growing up I also learned how to use the soldering iron, what electronic components are and how they work, especially during my high school years. I was lucky, because in my high school (Electronic and Telecommunications, of course) there were very great teachers, that taught and helped me with passion, this is exactly how a teacher should teach. You can’t imagine how wonderful is to know how a little component like transistor works… SO SIMPLY! (That’s because I always said to myself: “how can I get this to work with 3 pins?!”). After graduating, I continued to study electronic by myself, discovering “new” components like PIC Microcontrollers and doing many experiments on breadboards and on simulators like Multisim and recently Proteus, and also started computer programming, in Microsoft C# .NET thanks to one of my best internet friends, Domenico aka “Snake”, to make PC interfaces for my projects.

Years passed. I opened Jacksoft Labs because I wonted to share with all my knowledge and my experiences, but… As you can see I don’t update it very often, because lack of time. Just started to work, and continued to study to get a technician degree, or something like. A few month ago I moved to Germany, to look for a bit of luck and to see if my studies can be appreciated. How can you feel if the job of your dreams could be easily embraced but your homeland try to cut your legs because they want a nation full of ignorant peoples? Well, this is Italy.

Now I’ve just decided to open this little and simple blog to show you what I, or me with my IRC friends, discover or study while we NOT update the main website. We have ALWAYS something to learn… And even less time to do that!

What I wrote until now maybe doesn’t sound very interesting, I know, my life was so much filled with studies and experiments, and I’m still continuing to do this. I need more knowledge!

I’m sorry for my poor english, I’ll try to do the best I can. (And thanks to “Snake” to helping me fixing my posts, both in italian and in english. :P )